Street vocation: Reaching out to those who struggle

Matt Howard has spent years on Howard Center team assisting homeless and mentally ill

Feb. 17, 2013

Matt Young, supervisor for the Street Outreach Team, peers out the window of his office on College Street moments after seeing a client dragging a cart down the snow-covered sidewalk. / John Herrick, for the Free Press

Written by

John Herrick

Free Press Correspondent

The Fletcher Free Library, an elevated doorway, or an ATM booth can sometimes be the nearest shelter for the homeless in Burlington.

Matt Young, supervisor for the Howard Center’s Street Outreach Team, doesn’t just find the homeless shelter. He wants to show them the way to a home.

Young coordinates access to social services for those with mental and drug-related health issues, the homeless, and those struggling to rebuild their life in Burlington.

However, Young said that he has his own pathology: his urge to provide services to those in need.

In the 1970s, Young opened his own restaurant. The Ocean Club, located in Cambridge and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, served high-end seafood and Italian cuisine.

This was Young’s first experience as a service provider. He said he cared more about the kind of service he was providing to his customers than his profits.

“I was basically giving great food away,” he said. “Everybody had to be happy.”

He later hired a young African American man to work at the restaurant. This man, who had a mental illness, would brave through Boston’s South

End at irregular hours determined to show up for work. This was in the 1970s.

“He walked eight miles through very dangerous areas,” Young said. “He was taking his life in his hands every night. That really impressed me.”

This man changed the direction of Young’s career. After closing the restaurant because of management difficulties, he moved to Burlington to work as a social service provider.

Today, Young said that he is fascinated by the progression of his clients. Sometimes he is told that his clients have overcome seemingly unbeatable hardship to live successful lives.

“The resilience of people is an amazing thing to watch,” he said.

In the early 2000s, the Burlington Police Department said it needed an organization to manage disturbances caused by people with mental illnesses because the police were not qualified to deal with such erratic behavior.

Young then began his work with the Street Outreach Team. He said that within two hours on the job, he was overwhelmed.

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“The first year was crisis to crisis,” he said.

He said that there were multiple subgroups: the mentally ill, those with personality disorders, substance abusers, and the homeless.

Though all these groups had unique problems, their symptoms could be nearly identical.

Young said that many disruptive individuals do not need to be hospitalized or medicated. Instead, they just have compounding personal issues, such as a cable bill or a broken lock on their front door.

However, Young frequently has clients with more complicated issues.

These include financial, social, and mental hardships. However, he said that some of these clients recover with the help of service providers around Burlington.

“Just how they can put a life together, it amazes me,” he said.

While sometimes a new set of boots can get individuals back on their feet, some have stuck with the program since its founding, Young said.

He said that last year the team assisted approximately 550 individuals, though they have had years as high as 950. Some people they see everyday and can have as many as 15,000 contacts with individuals annually.

Young said he is not always proud of his work. Sometimes people are content to sleep in an ATM booth or shelter themselves in a doorway.

“I have to be the bad guy. I have to wake them up,” he said. “I would much rather walk by if someone is warm in an ATM.”

Young said he wants to help these people get their life together. However, sometimes he needs to wake people up to prevent them from getting into further trouble.

“If I don’t wake them up, what if a concerned citizen has to call the police? We just don’t want to see you get in trouble,” he said.